Site Mobile Navigation

Two Novelists Take on the Haggadah

Nathan Englander, left, translated the liturgical text for the “New American Haggadah,” which Jonathan Safran Foer edited. Four writers contributed commentary.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

AFTER a lengthy interview with President Obama in the Oval Office two weeks ago, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, had one more question, and it had nothing to do with Iran.

“I know this is cheesy ...” Mr. Goldberg started, but before he could finish, the president interrupted him. “What, you have a book?” Mr. Obama asked. Turns out, Mr. Goldberg did, but “it’s not just any book,” he replied.

Mr. Goldberg reached into his briefcase and handed the president an advance copy of the “New American Haggadah,” a new translation of the Passover liturgy that was edited by Jonathan Safran Foer and contains commentary by Mr. Goldberg and other contemporary writers.

After thumbing through the sleek hardcover book, Mr. Obama looked up and asked wryly, “Does this mean that we can’t use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?”

Mr. Goldberg was impressed. “Way to deploy the inside-Jewish joke,” he later said. Since the 1930s, Maxwell House has printed more than 50 millions copies of its pamphlet-style version of the Haggadah. It has been the go-to choice at the Obamas’ White House Seders, though Mr. Goldberg hoped the president would consider using their version this time around.

In the end, the White House decided to stick with the Maxwell House next month. But the book’s advance buzz is an unlikely triumph for a version of a ritualistic text that was spearheaded by two lauded experimental novelists from Brooklyn, Mr. Foer and Nathan Englander.

“The Haggadah is the user’s manual for the most widely celebrated Jewish holiday, Passover, ” Mr. Foer said on “The Colbert Report” last Tuesday. “It’s one of the oldest continually told stories, and one of the most well-known across cultures.”

Photo

The new version of the text for the Seder liturgy.Credit
Jake Guevara/The New York Times

As anyone who has been to a vegan feminist Seder knows, there are Haggadot of every stripe, from Orthodox volumes bound in leather to modern retellings posted online. One feminist version reserves the seventh night of Passover for “rest and recline as free women.” A vegetarian Haggadah swaps shank bone, which represents the paschal sacrifice, for beet.

Another Haggadah, written for gay people, adds sweeter touches to the Seder plate, like coconut, flowers, pickled vegetables and fruit salad. And to the Four Questions of Passover, it adds a fifth: “Why, on this night, do we have pride?”

One might assume that Mr. Foer’s version would end up being almost unrecognizably postmodern. A critical darling since his mid-20s, Mr. Foer, 35, has been celebrated and excoriated for his use of avant-garde literary devices in novels like “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” which ends with a 14-page flip book.

And starting out, that was the direction in which its creators were leaning. As Mr. Englander, who grew up in an Orthodox house on Long Island, put it, “I originally thought we’d be making some sort of hipster Haggadah.”

Indeed. The book’s minimalist design, by Oded Ezer, looks like a catalog for a MoMA typography exhibition, and the text is rendered both vertically (for the Exodus story) and horizontally (for commentary and a timeline). In place of storybook illustrations of Moses are abstract watercolor illustrations based on Hebrew typography.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The idea was to draw readers into the story and invite them to linger, since “the Haggadah must be the most skimmed book of all,” Mr. Foer said. After a pause, he added, “maybe Stephen Hawking’s ‘Brief History of Time’ beats it.”

In his translation of the traditional liturgy, Mr. Englander — whose collection of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” was published last month — sought to reveal the fundamental poetry of the story, he said. In some cases, that involved stripping away the elevated language of older versions. The Maxwell House version from his youth, for example, renders the opening line of The Four Questions as, “Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights?” In his version, the line is simply, “What makes this night different from all other nights?”

(Maxwell House made a similar change last year, with a revised edition, eliminating gender-biased language and anachronisms.)

Photo

The latest version courtesy of Maxwell House.

In other cases, it involved subtle word choices. In the Ten Plagues passage, the plague of darkness that God brings down on the Egyptians becomes “a clotted darkness — too thick to pass.” (“It was a darkness so dense and thick, those caught in it were frozen in place,” Mr. Englander, 42, explained.) The standard “Our God” became “God-of-us” (“It is not about ownership of God — God forbid — or possession,” he said).

To spur discussion around the Seder table, the authors enlisted four writers to contribute commentary.

Mr. Goldberg examines the political themes of the Haggadah, at one point recounting the moral ambiguities of holding a Seder in an Israeli army prison camp that held members of Hamas and Fatah. The philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein examines the Haggadah’s literary subcurrents. The scholar Nathaniel Deutsch weighs in on theology. The children’s author Daniel Handler, best known as Lemony Snicket, examines themes for youth, at one point contrasting Elijah the Prophet with Santa Claus.

Mr. Foer got the idea for creating a new Haggadah after a Seder at his grandparents’ house in Washington, D.C., nine years ago. Mr. Foer came away feeling that the Maxwell House freebie had failed to inspire adequate dialogue on topics like identity, faith and social justice. “The conversation just didn’t feel as vibrant as it should have been,” he recalled, “and we found ourselves wanting to skip instead of linger.”

So he set out to deconstruct the traditional Haggadah with analysis by 30 marquee writers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Simon Schama, Tony Kushner, Michael Pollan as well as artwork by the painter R. B. Kitaj. He also planned to include commentary of his own.

As submissions rolled in, however, Mr. Foer began to doubt the approach. Beneath all the brilliant analysis, the fundamental function of the Haggadah — as a “user’s manual” for the Seder — was getting buried.

“The worst thing one could do with a Haggadah is get in the way of that participation by overlaying a political or aesthetic agenda, or obscuring the language with lyricism, or drawing attention to its creators,” Mr. Foer said. So he slashed the number of contributors to four, leaving his own commentary on the cutting-room floor. And the essays ended up running without bylines.